


Words of Mass Effect

by Ortholeine



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Gen, Some relationships, not really the focus tho, random word prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 09:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6465547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ortholeine/pseuds/Ortholeine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Words have meaning, power, and connotation. Some words don't apply to everyone, and here are some drabbles of different words and how they work in some character's minds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words of Mass Effect

Jane Shepard had lived through many fear-inducing events without much panic on her end. Batarian slavers attacking her home colony, leaving her with a mentor in a man named Anderson and a determination to fight, but no lingering fear.

 

Jane Shepard had survived the Skyllian Blitz, with more than just a once-pretty dress ruined and torn to shreds. The PTSD that all soldiers suffer only worsened, but the fear that gripped some of her comrades was missing in the quiet hero. She did fear hero-worship, as she soon found out, retreating into the shadows of the Alliance and N-training.

 

Jane Shepard didn’t think of fear or anything else when she shoved Kaidan Alenko out of the beacon’s range—it was rather instinctual. There was an inkling of fear, of something more unknown than space itself and something more dangerous than a rogue Spectre, that began to grow in her hear then. Where it all started.

 

Jane Shepard felt a twinge of fear that gradually grew to full-blown terror as the shrill whistling of air escaping her suit drowned out even her panicked breathing. When she awoke there was a sudden irrational fear of being spaced in anything other than the _Normandy_ or its shuttles.

 

Jane Shepard was fearful. Of dying—dying again, and how many people could say that “again?”—of losing loved ones. Of failing both herself and Thane and Ashley and Garrus and Kaidan and everyone else both dead and alive. However, that fear would never be documented, even after her second death. Fear was not a part of Shepard’s vocabulary, after all.

 

 

Aria T’Loak did not know fear. She couldn’t, as a young stupid asari fighting an old Krogan who has since become older. She couldn’t still as the queen, boss, CEO, of Omega. Fear was instilled by her, not the other way around.

 

Aria T’Loak did experience fear if she could help. Sure there was the thrill that came from fire and biotic fights. The rush of some new power player or assassination attempt. But never fear. Fear…was odd. It didn’t inspire the same way trust over years did like for that upstart human Spectre she did not owe.

 

Aria T’Loak does not know how lesser beings, lesser people, live in a daily state of fear. Every once in a while it could be healthy but the daily doses some who lived in her domain experienced couldn’t be good for them. A shrug and the thought was gone.

 

Aria T’Loak did not feel fear when Cerberus thought they could control her home. There was no fear when she fought alongside the Alliance-turned-Cerberus-turned-galactic-hero to reclaim her people and palace.

 

Aria T’Loak may have experienced a twinge of fear when the relays were all shut down. When all communication, good and bad, necessary and pointless, ceased. Fear that people she may not care for more than as assets could be dead. Fear that the Reapers could do—and had done—what Cerberus had failed.

 

  

Reapers do not know the word fear. They do not feel fear, for they don’t have the necessary chemical properties to experience emotions for emotions are weaknesses and weaknesses would make Reapers less than what they are.

 

Reapers do not know the word fear, but they do know the word Shepard, and that is close enough for them. When their drone Saren—for he was not a servant, because the word servant entails thoughtfulness and independence and Saren was anything but—first encountered this Shepard they were not even worried. They didn’t blink, or rather their equivalent. But then Sovereign was gone and Shepard could not exist any longer.

 

Reapers do not know the word fear, but they do know the sensation that comes with facing the Shepard. Many slaves, drones, had done much to thwart the Shepard from killing her to trying to destroy her on an emotional and weak level. Death could hold Shepard no more than their slave in the form of the Illusive Man.

 

Reapers do not know the word fear, but they do know the confusion that comes with fighting a galactic force, a universal entity, in the form of Shepard. The confusion that comes with a bloody, tired, and _slow_ conversation about Creators and people who do not matter and evolution and progress that ends in fire and explosions and a bright red light and then noth—

 

The Reapers did not know the word fear but the textbooks will use that same identifier for how the Reapers viewed the great Commander Shepard.


End file.
